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Book Discussion: The Cowboy Way

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Oregondoggie:
An' in another book there's more...

In Cowgirls, Women of the American West, by Teresa Jordan; Doubleday, 1982, the opening non-fiction paragraphs in the introduction pretty much parallel the beginning scene in Ennis' trailer...including a reference to a "wedge"..."Only her wedge of brunette hair betrays her sex."  And outside, the wind beats against the windows....

Later, if yur into singin' along with Ennis, Jordan provides the new version of "The Old Strawberry Roan"... maybe not the salty one, but pretty brusque and wry.

So I'm bettin' Annie had sopped up the whiskey from a lot of ole books about cowboyin' and sheep and stuff, by the time she wrote Brokeback Mountain. 

Front-Ranger:
I think you're right, doggie. The two times I have heard Annie speak, she has cited tons of books, writings, photographs, paintings, and documentaries. She really knows how to do her research! In fact, I bought my copy of The Virginian at the Casper library, and it's an old old paperback that's had a lot of use. I like to fanticize that it came from her!!

Front-Ranger:
Back to The Cowboy Way. Cowboys are busy through the long winters. Every morning they have to "check the drop" on the cows--that means to check on the position of the unborn calves and see how close the Mothers are to giving birth. That's what they call them--the mothers. The cows need help giving birth most of the time. The cowboys learn the telltale signs--going off by herself, walking around slowly, lowing, but sometimes it's as clear as a hoof or two sticking out. When it's time, two cowboys put the mother in a chute so she can't bite them, position themselves on either side, and one cowboy reaches in with a leather belt and puts it around the calf. They brace themselves against the mother's rump and pull the calf out. It's usually single digit weather, and the cowboys often swing the calf around by its hind legs to get it going, so to speak. But other times the calf must get up on its own, balance on its shaky new legs, find the teat, and begin to suck. If it can't do that, it's a goner. So, that is the major winter chore in the life of a cowboy.

Front-Ranger:
The winter of 1886 was a hard one in the American West as chronicled in The Cowboy Way by David McCumber. It was presaged by a drought that summer, fall rains which did not come, and dire portents like a particularly shaggy coat on the range cattle and higher than normal piles of birches by the beaver ponds. After cold snowy spells in Devember and January, February was a nightmare, with night time lows averaging 27.5 degrees below zero.

At this time there were more than one million head of cattle at large on the ranges of Montana and thereabouts. Stockmen didn't feed their cattle hay in the winter at that time. There was no hay to feed them: no one had plowed up the range and planted it. The cattle were expected to forage for the winter, though with between two and six feet of snow on the ground, how they would do that was anybody's guess. When the chinook winds came in March to uncover the damage, the losses ranged from 40 to 95 percent. Carcasses littered the prairie. A young cowboy named Charlie Russell was speechless to explain it to Eastern absentee owners, so he sent a watercolor sketch instead: a lone emaciated cow, hunched against a fence. "Waiting for a Chinook" was also called "The Last of 5,000." That winter taught the stockmen that they could not leave the dogs to babysit the cows thru the winter, and the Western hay farming industry was born.

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